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Micro Reviews, 2026

Created: 2026-03-27 (14:36:00) — Modified: 2026-04-10 (14:14:00)
Status: in progress

It’s taken me too long to realise I will never have enough time in this life to write, draw, make games, and on top of that also write lengthy essays about every single book I’ve ever read. I’m trying this year, as a compromise, to at least write something about them. So: micro-reviews!

David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious—does every single term being deployed need a detailed explication of its etymological roots? But the terms are useful.

I don’t know enough art theory to compare this book against other approaches, but I do appreciate the attempt to develop a vocabulary for art that does not specifically privilege the western tradition. I probably will not reread this book again in full for a long time. I will be reading in it pretty much constantly.

Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren, vol. 1

This is such a good opening to the series. Frieren, a long-loved elven mage, retraces the journey she undertook almost a century ago, encountering and remembering her former travelling companions. I’m fond of the autumnal tones with which this book starts and looking forward to seeing how later volumes develop Frieren as a character.

Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren, vol. 2

Where the first volume spans almost a century, this one slows down to focus on a couple years’ journey north. I’m still curious to see how the series will handle the likelihood Frieren will outlive her new travelling companions, but do not mind that it is not being raised just yet.

This volume also introduces demons, described as wild beasts that can only mimic human speech and society. Much less interested in this. It’s still early days. I hope they develop into something more complex than inherently evil, token antagonists.

Leena Krohn, Tainaron: Mail from Another City

A woman moves to a city inhabited by talking insects, and writes letters her friend or former lover back across the ocean. I thought I would like this more, but for the most part the novel does not compellingly explore either the unfamiliarity of life in Tainaron, nor the narrator’s relationship with the silent recipient of her letters. It’s understated in a way that may benefit from a reread—I’m not sure, though, that I would get more out of it if I sat with it for longer.

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary

Filled with the minutiae of its characters’ daily lives—schoolwork, conversations among friends, family squabbles, arguments on bulletin-board systems—which suggests more critical things happening just under the surface, on an emotional level. The same for the literary allusions: they are used less as clues and more to establish moods and resonances, so that when the novel does reach its conclusion it all makes an appalling sort of sense why its characters make the decisions they do.

It doesn’t pull all its loose threads together half as well as Tam Lin. But it is fantastic, eerie and puzzling.

Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Near-perfect. It is miraculous the way this book can inflect its humour with sadness, and its melancholic moments with lightness. I love that its characters are full of song and verse. I love that it feels no obligation to give them an easy, happy ending. I love that it is about being loved for who you are and not what you do, that it pushes back against being a hero even as it is obsessed with, explores our need for heroic narratives.

Taiyo Matsumoto, Ping Pong Volume One

This left me cold. The setting is more grounded than Tekkonkinkreet’s Treasure Town, although the same frenetic energy of that book still comes through in the actual ping-pong sequences themselves.

I think part of the problem is that it quickly establishes what drives and gnaws at its characters, the way they relate to one another, but then doesn’t develop them much further. It’s oddly listless. I’m interested to see where volume two takes it from here.

Ursula Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

Orsinia may be my favourite of Ursula Le Guin’s imaginary worlds, a country in which escape tends to be the only option, however provisional it ends up being. The glimmering thread throughout these stories is that even in a country as bleak as Orsinia, and even against the near-certainty that things will not work out, her characters still have the guts to make the attempt.

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